A Storyline I left Out of my newest novel.

With every book I write, I end up with too much material which results in cuts having to made. Sometimes it’s my editor who tells me “Character X is superfluous, nix them.” Or sometimes as I go through the third draft, I feel the story being dragged down by a plot or a character that doesn’t really serve the whole story. But it always hurts to erase something.

Imagine a painting you put six months of your life into, only to then realize at the end that tree you spent so much time on is blocking too much of the main subject matter. Over the years I have had to delete many side plots and side characters that I hated to see go but keeping them hurt the story.

In my latest novel RED/BLUE I had two such characters. Writing about a post-apocalyptic world gave me a lot of fun situations to depict. Lots of action, suspense, and “gotcha” twists. But one not-so-page-turning storyline I really enjoyed exploring but ended up cutting out. Married couple Wanda and Paul had been a normal, routine husband and wife in normal life, but the destruction of the world as they knew it pulled them further apart rather than closer together. I was interested in the idea of how a couple “divorces” in a society where there are no longer legal systems, courtrooms, and property settlements. Wanda and Paul were characters living among the residents in RED/BLUE’s Vernon High School colony.

Everyone liked them both. Each, on their own, were nice people. They simply no longer liked each other anymore. Going your separate ways can be difficult when outside the walls of where you now live is filled with monsters and death. It’s not like Paul could have moved East. No, there were no choices for them other than to stay behind the secured fortifications of Vernon. But how does a couple split when there are limited quarters to live in, and no possible way to not encounter your ex in every corridor and at every meal?

Besides the logistics, there was the moral aspect. Paul and Wanda had been married in their faith. Would God let them out of their marriage as easily as just considering themselves divorced? The failure of the marriage was not their only storyline. Paul and Wanda had threaded connection throughout the book and their ending was EPIC! However, not every character is guaranteed surviving to the end of the story (especially in my books). And alas, for poor Paul and Wanda, they didn’t survive into the beginning of the book.

Their story goes untold. Although, I did merge their characters (or at least their purpose and conclusion) into two existing characters and I believe that decision truly made RED/BLUE awesome at the end. The eradication of this complicated husband and wife and weaving their trajectory into other characters took the book from a 7 to a 9 right away. But hey…at least their names made it into a Substack article